Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s brother Yahdih holds a copy of Guantánamo Diary, which is on the Samuel Johnson prize longlist, at the book’s unveiling earlier this year.
Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s diary detailing the torture he experienced while imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay has made the longlist for the Samuel Johnson prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for non-fiction.

Held in Guantánamo since 2002, despite never being charged with a crime, Slahi began to write a diary three years into his captivity. Described as an “extraordinary account of rendition, captivity and torture” by Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian, the Mauritanian’s memoir, published as Guantánamo Diary, is among 12 titles in contention for the £20,000 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, alongside works including an unauthorised biography of Ted Hughes by Jonathan Bate, and Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, an exploration of how language shapes our sense of place.

The 2015 Samuel Johnson prize longlist – in pictures

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Guantánamo Diary is a “brutally original” memoir, said the prize jury on Monday, as they revealed a longlist described as spanning “the breadth of non-fiction writing, from literary biography and history to journalism and travel writing”. Won last year by Helen Macdonald’s bestselling memoir about grief and hawking, H is for Hawk, the Samuel Johnson prize has been won in the past by writers ranging from Antony Beevor to Kate Summerscale.

This year’s judging panel, chaired by the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum, also longlisted Tim Snyder’s study of the ideas which enabled the Holocaust, Black Earth, Robert Gildea’s history of the French resistance, Fighters in the Shadows, and Emma Sky’s The Unravelling, an insider’s account of the Iraq war and its aftermath.

The Withnail and I film director Bruce Robinson makes the cut for his investigation into the identity of Jack the Ripper, They All Love Jack, which proposes a new theory about the killer’s identity, while Oliver Morton was picked for his exploration of geo-engineering, The Planet Remade, and Peter Pomerantsev for his look at modern Russia, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible.

Joining Applebaum on the judges’ panel are the Intelligent Life editor Emma Duncan, the New Scientist editor Sumit Paul-Choudhury, Professor Rana Mitter of the University of Oxford, and Tessa Ross, the producer and former head of Film4. Applebaum said the longlist contains “something for everybody … whatever your tastes”.

“We didn’t plan it this way, but this year’s Samuel Johnson prize longlist includes pretty much every important non-fiction genre: biography, history, science writing, travel writing, journalism,” said the historian, who will announce the panel’s choice of winner on 2 November.